Editing Fiction

You’ve finished your first draft: now what? Time for the challenging task of editing, polishing and honing your own work. How can you look at it with fresh eyes when you’ve sweated blood over it? Over the course of a week, we’ll offer practical advice on a range of frequently encountered problems and help you to stop feeling snow-blind, redraft your work and ready it for the next stage. You don’t have to kill all your darlings, but you will learn, as Diana Athill advises, to “look at them with a very beady eye”.